Word limit leads to polishing

I had a quite interesting writer’s Eureka moment today, while writing a vss (very short stories) on twitter.

Sometimes while writing a short story on twitter I use Colours of a Cultural Chameleon as an inspiration source. That’s what I did today, even though the prompt word ‘pale’ is nonexistent in my book. I looked up synonyms for the word. I looked for tense, scared, tired etc. With the ‘tense’ query I found what I was looking for .

I chose this section about travelling to Tajikistan and rewrote it to fit in with twitter’s word count for tweets. Therefore, I had to drastically rewrite the scene; I needed to leave out certain words and passages, I had to choose wisely and delete unnecessary words. In other cases (previous tweets) I also had to kill my darlings.

You want to know what it was I finally tweeted? Here it is 🙂

“Why're u travelling here?” the slick-suited officer asked
“We’re going to Tajikistan” John answered
“This is going to AFGHAN border. Why are u here!?”
My face turned #pale
Involuntary my hands went to my chin, I rubbed my cheeks
'Don't show fear' is the mantra I repeated #vss365

— Shakti Hannie (@HannieShakti) September 13, 2022

So, what I noticed is that by reusing passages from my book to write these very short stories, I was actually polishing the scenes in the book and improving as a writer. What a great win-win.

If you want to read more ‘very short stories’ I’ve published on twitter, then check out one of my previous blog posts.

https://shaktihannie.com/2021/11/22/very-short-stories-365-days-a-year/: Word limit leads to polishing